Tuesday, July 18, 2006

It happened before

I hate it when my doctoral thesis gets topical. Here are some figures:

1975

1976

1977

1978

1979

1980

1981

333

282

277

190

103

33

81

92

169

460

1110

802

258

141

3

8

5

28

21

25

15

Take a moment to read across the rows and get a feel for the shape of the series. Row one starts pretty high - almost one of these things per day - then declines year on year, plummets to almost nothing in 1980 and makes a weak recovery in 1981. Row two starts low-ish (about one every four days) then rises continuously and rapidly as the first series falls; it peaks in 1978 at the extraordinary value of 1110 (three of these things per day) then declines quite steeply, although the 1981 value is still higher than the 1975 starting point. As for the third row, it starts low, jumps to a higher value at the time of the 1978 peak, then stays close to that higher level for the next few years, even while the second series declines.

The figures all relate to Italy. Row one represents the number of mass radical protests (strikes, demos, occupations, mass shoplifts, rent strikes, etc). It's an approximate figure in all sorts of ways, but everything I've read suggests that the trend is valid.

We have been functioning here for the last 10 or 15 years and nobody has ever been arrested for any terrorism-related offences. What this will do is it will militarise many people, because if you stop people propagating their thoughts and ideas, then you will push them underground and after that you have no control over them.